Chapter 3: Chapter 3: The Realm of Infamy

The first few minutes of the car ride took place in silence.  Jason was trying to imagine what kind of job the government could have for a gamer that would earn him a hundred grand in one night.  Any doubt about his DM’s ability to produce that kind of money had disappeared when he saw the car they would be taking.  It was a Tesla, but it was like something out of a science fiction movie and must be the latest, most top-of-the-line model and probably cost a fortune.

Conor didn’t talk at first because he was trying to figure out how to tell Jason about the most unbelievable thing in the world that almost no one knew existed.  “Have you heard of the Realm of Infamy?” Conor finally asked.

Jason thought for a while but shook his head.

“I didn’t think so.”  Conor paused again as he navigated his car onto an interstate heading west.  This late at night, traffic was sparse, allowing him to move to the left lane, put the cruise control on, and let his Tesla do the driving so he could concentrate on telling his story.

“Realm of Infamy was an MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) that came out about three years ago.  It was designed by two ex-hackers, one from Turkey and one from India.  They didn’t speak much English, and their translation software wasn’t great at first, so it didn’t take off here.  They wanted to design a non-traditional game where the lines of good and evil were blurred, and the best solution to a problem wasn’t always one that we, in the Western world, would think was ‘good.’”

“Hence Infamy?” Jason said.

“Yes.  The game itself was pretty tame at first and nothing worse than you would see in an Assassin’s Creed or Grand Theft Auto game, but they really wanted users to create their own quests, or modules, for others to play.  So they made an immensely expansive world and left 95% of it open for user content.  And the users created tons of stuff, most of it much worse than anything you’ve seen, where they force the players to make choices between two horrible outcomes and then have both decisions turn out badly.  As you can imagine, it wasn’t well received in the US or most of Europe.  Slapping an MA+ rating on it wasn’t enough, and most stores refused to carry it.

“In addition, people had problems with the leveling system.  In most games, you race to level 20 or 99, get the most powerful spells, and then you can single-handedly kill anything.  This game was different.  Level 12 characters could kill level 20 characters. Strategy was more important than hit points.  Plus, there was no cap on experience.  The highest I’ve ever seen someone get is level 30, but you could theoretically get up to level 100 or above.  The game just scales up for you.”

“And it is a standard RPG?” Jason asked.

“Yes.  Elves, Dwarves, Paladins, Wizards.  I can explain all that later, or maybe Gracie can; she is better than I am and will be your operator tonight.”

“My operator?”

“Right, I almost forgot.” Conor reached into a small coin compartment in the car and pulled out an individually wrapped pill.  “You need to take this.  I hope I didn’t wait too long.”

Jason took the unassuming pill gingerly while Conor pulled a water bottle from the chilled center console.  “What is this?”

“A muscle relaxant.  You’ll need it.”

“It’s okay to take after alcohol?” Jason asked as he tore open the package.

“It’s better with alcohol.  That’s why I gave you the beer.”

With $100k on the line, Jason didn’t ask too many questions and used the offered water to swallow the pill.

“This game is almost exclusively played with a VR set,” Conor continued.

“So, I will be wearing a headset and wandering around, trying not to bump into things?”

Conor laughed.  Jason was in for a big surprise.  “No, not one of those.  The illegal kind.”

Jason didn’t bother asking for clarification and just stared at the driver as Conor took control to exit the interstate.  Conor could feel his stare and let him wait a few moments before continuing.  “What would you do if you found a new way to cook meth so it worked amazingly well as a weight loss drug?  If you took small doses daily, your metabolism would go way up, your hunger would be suppressed, and you would have more energy for exercise.”

“But it’s meth,” Jason clarified, wondering not for the last time he was getting into.

“Yes,” Conor said, “it is dangerous.  But if taken in small doses under supervision, it has no harmful side effects.  You run a test trial with 100 adults who lose an average of 30 pounds in a month and are in perfect health.  Then, after another month, 80 are addicted to the drug, and 40 have died from an overdose.”

“Obviously, you can’t go to market with it,” Jason said, seeing how the parallel would be drawn.

“Right.  If used properly under supervision, it is harmless and, in fact, quite good for you.  But you can’t trust the general public to follow instructions with something as addictive as that.  You could say the same thing about skydiving or SCUBA.  Try doing that without following the safety protocols, and you will die.”

“And this VR technology is the same way?” Jason asked, wondering how badly he needed $100k.

“It plugs into your brain full Matrix-style, sans the long scary spike, and when you open your eyes, you are in the computer game.  You can touch, taste, see, and feel everything around you.  You control your limbs with the same parts of your brain as in real life, except you can be a level 20 wizard throwing fireballs.  However, fail to set the equipment up properly, log off incorrectly, or experience a power failure in the middle of the game, and you can scramble your brain and possibly never walk again.”

“If this system is so dangerous and illegal, how do you have one?”

“Nuclear weapons are dangerous and illegal, but the government has plenty of those.  When you work for Washington, you get some perks.”

Jason nodded. “And everyone else?  How do they get them?”

“There are black markets everywhere.  Just because something is illegal doesn’t mean people can’t buy and sell it.  Illegal drugs and weapons are sold in nearly every country every day.”

“Yes,” Jason argued, “but I’ve heard of those.  I’ve never heard of this VR system.  How do people look to buy something illegal they’ve never heard of?”

“First rule of Fight Club,” Conor replied cryptically.

Jason got the point and decided to change topics.  He still wanted to know more about the mission.  “Okay, but I still don’t understand what this has to do with National Security.”

“Before 2020, terrorists, arms dealers, and the like understood that the international law enforcement community could monitor their cell phones and read their emails.  For ultimate security, you had to be face-to-face.  This meant international travel.  With the use of satellites, that could also be tracked.  They monitored private jets flying in and out of airports and kept an eye out for large caravans of trucks moving through Middle Eastern roads.

“Then 2020 happened, and travel stopped.  Terrorists didn’t care too much about government lockdowns, but if they were the only planes in the air or trucks crossing a border, it would be even easier than before to track them.  The world moved to Skype and Zoom calls, and they tried it for a while, but those are also easily hacked.

“Then someone found Realm of Infamy or ROI.  Because of its questionable content and rejection by the mainstream community, the game had moved to the dark web, and since two hackers designed it, it had impressive security.  You could log in, meet with someone else in a tavern or empty cave, have a conversation, and then log out, and no one would ever know.  The governments weren’t watching.”

Conor pulled off the main road and started navigating a few smaller residential streets.  “Eventually, the authorities found out about it and started to investigate, but unless you were logged into the game and found the player character of the terrorist, you couldn’t listen in.  When they logged in through a console, there were still ways to hack their account and find out where they were, but it wasn’t easy.  However, it was over once the VR headsets became compatible about a year ago.  No one can hack the human brain with a computer.  It is the ultimate firewall.  If they are logged in through a VR set, there is no way to tell where they are.

“But that was just the start. These criminals soon realized they could run their whole business through the game.  ROI offers the ability to buy gold coins in the game with real money, and you can sell gold coins or items to other players for real money.  So now they could do business deals without involving the banks or huge suitcases of cash.

“Terrorist cells started training in the game.  Before, they would need large camps with lots of equipment that could be tracked by satellite.  Now, they can have 50 men log in from all over the world and sit down for a meeting, and then they can run drills and practice suicide runs.  We’ve found mockups of real-life locations in the game, and then a week later, a car bomb would go off in that area.”

“The simulation is that good?” Jason asked.  “I mean, learning how to throw a fireball in a video game doesn’t mean you can throw one in real life.”

“They aren’t practicing magic.  They practice formations, timing, and working as a group.  Your brain controls your movements in the game the same way it does in the real world.  It translates pretty well.  You’ve taken some sword fighting lessons?”

Jason nodded.  He occasionally went to Star Wars conventions, and he and his buddies would do lightsaber demonstrations.

“That skill will translate into the game, and if you learn some acrobatic move, it will translate back into real life, assuming you have comparable dexterity.”

Conor pulled the car into the driveway of a small home in a quiet neighborhood.  It was almost midnight, and no one was about.  “We’re here.”  He rechecked his phone.  “Time is short. We should hurry; we don’t want to keep my sister waiting.”

“Gracie?” Jason asked.

“Yes, your operator.”

“I have so many other questions,” Jason said as he exited the car and followed his host into the garage and then the house.

“I’m sure you do, but as with most things, it will be better to show you than tell you.”

The two men entered the house through the kitchen and then took a left down the stairs to the basement.  Jason stopped in awe at the setup they had.  The basement was finished with thick carpeting and painted walls.  A massive computer desk sat in the corner of the room, with an athletic black woman sitting at the keyboard, typing furiously and looking between three large screens.  On the wall next to her hung a 100-inch TV playing what looked like a fantasy movie.  Jason had watched almost every fantasy movie ever made, but he didn’t know this one, and with the production quality he was seeing, he couldn’t believe he would have missed it.

Jason moved around the black leather couch before the TV to examine the movie closer.  A knight was scaling a cliff face, fighting the wind and precarious handholds while a large bird of prey kept attacking him.  Eventually, he successfully beat the predator away with his sword, clipping the creature’s wing, but he almost fell to his death in the process.  After finding a secure purchase again, he continued up the wall but hadn’t made it more than 20 feet before another bird attacked.

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“This is the game,” Jason said finally, figuring out why he hadn’t seen it before.

“Yes,” Conor confirmed.  “And that is your character, Sir Wilhelm Stark, twelfth-level paladin.  He’s one of the best Gracie has ever built.”

Jason looked back at the woman behind the keyboard.  She had three monitors to work with, but none of them showed the image on the big screen.  Instead, two were just constant data streams, while the other looked like an internet page filled with stats and charts.  “Is she playing?”

“Not exactly,” Conor clarified, taking a seat on the couch and inviting Jason to do likewise.  “Sir Willie up there is being run by an Artificial Intelligence that Gracie programmed.  One of those screens shows the decision trees he is constantly following.  The AI is designed to process information like a human brain, so the game thinks that our paladin is being controlled through a VR set.  Most areas and modules are only accessible by VR.  The older modules are all backward compatible, but everything built into the game now needs a VR set to process.  Or you need someone as smart as my sister to figure out how to cheat the system.”

“Your sister . . .” Jason left it hanging, knowing that Conor had to be expecting the question.

“You want to know how an old, pallid-faced Irishman is the brother to a beautiful black woman?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“I married his brother,” Gracie spoke up from the keyboard, proving her multitasking skills went beyond monitoring three screens simultaneously.  She did pause her keyboard activity for a moment to turn and regard the two men.  “Welcome, Jason.  Conor has told me a lot about you.  I hope you like the character I’ve built for you.”

“Thanks,” Jason replied, unsure who he should be questioning.  Gracie made it easy by returning to her screens and resuming the game.  “But what exactly do you need me to do?”

On the screen, the knight had made it to the top of the cliff and found a jagged mountaintop covered in snow.  Wolves and spiders attacked him as he navigated through a maze-like collection of rocks and crags.  “You said you wanted me to solve a puzzle, but that looks like normal combat to me, and he is doing fine.”

“This is the fifth stage of the module.  The sixth is private, we can’t see it happening, and when we send an AI player in, their decision tree breaks down.  They don’t know what to do, and we can’t direct them.  We’ve sent half a dozen AI players into the sixth stage, and we can’t get anywhere.  After about half an hour-”

“Thirty-six minutes,” Gracie clarified, calling out without turning around.

“Which is about half an hour,” Conor grumbled at the correction, “the game kills our character.”

“So, you reload and try again.  You’ve only done the level half a dozen times.  Is it new?”

“It’s a few months old,” Conor said, “but we don’t just respawn.  When you die in VR mode, your character is dead, and you must start over.  If you die playing from a console, you respawn at your last save point, but in VR, there are consequences.  As we’ve discussed, you can do some pretty horrible things in this game, and if the worst thing that could happen to you is just respawning, things would be much worse than they are now.  It takes Gracie a couple of weeks to get the characters up to level 12, which is the bare minimum even to attempt this module.  From most online discussion forums, people try to get to level 15, but that would take over a month.”

“So, what’s so great about this level that you need me to pass it – that the US government is willing to pay me a hundred grand to pass it?”

“Have you told him nothing?” Gracie asked.

“The prize for this level is supposed to be a level 50 item,” Conor said, ignoring his sister.  “That doesn’t mean much to you now, so understand that it would be the most powerful object in the game.  Right now, the people using the game to run their criminal enterprises are stockpiling all of the valuable equipment.  They have all the best weapons, magical items, protection devices, strongholds, NPCs, and so on.  The more powerful they get in the game, the harder it is to disrupt them.

“If two powerful arms dealers want to meet in the game, they want to do so in a secure location where they know they will not be spied on.  In the beginning, CIA agents would get in the game and make massive suicide runs against an arms dealer’s stronghold and occasionally be successful in disrupting their activities and possibly forcing one or more of the criminals to start their character over.  Gracie can build a level 12 character in a couple of weeks, but a normal player takes a month or more.  And that is just to get to level 12.  You don’t have a real sense of security until you hit the high teens or 20, which could take six months.  Right now, we have information that a small group of German arms dealers is close to cracking this module, and if they get their hands on this item, the power will shift dramatically.  In the real world, it would be like our worst enemies getting nuclear weapons with no risk of sanctions or international retaliation if they use them.”

Jason nodded, able to fill in many of the gaps Conor didn’t mention.  It was almost a game within a game.  It was your classic cat-and-mouse setup of espionage and information smuggling, but the side that could play the RPG game the best would get the upper hand in the fight.

“Someone on the outside created this quest that I am about to attempt, right?  It was written and added to the game by an independent designer.  User-created content.”

“Yes,” Conor said.

“Then why don’t these gun runners just hire a coder to design a super easy quest and have the prize be a level 100 item.”

“Gandhi wouldn’t allow it,” Gracie said over her shoulder.

“Who’s Gandhi?  I mean, besides the historical figure.”

“Gandhi is the advanced AI the two designers have set up to oversee the game,” Conor said.  “Remember, one of them is from India.  I think GANDHI is supposed to stand for Google Automated Nano-Dano-Hano Intelligence.  I don’t know.  It is one of those acronyms where they picked the final word before choosing what it stood for.  Like Marvel’s SHIELD.  No one even thinks of it as an acronym anymore.”

“But Gandhi monitors all the module submissions,” Grace said.  “If the module is too easy, it gets rejected with advised improvements.  If it is too difficult, same thing.  If the prize at the end is too good, it gets modified.  For whatever reason, Gandhi greenlit this module with a level 50 item at the end.”

“You say that like you don’t think he should have,” Jason observed.

She shrugged without turning around.  “Well, no one has passed it yet.  If it goes on for another month, it will break Psycho’s record of half a year, though no one really ever did solve that module.”

“Psycho?” Jason asked, looking at Conor.

“Another module you don’t need to worry about,” Conor said, tossing a frustrated look at his sister for overloading their recruit.  “This module is hard.  We’ve passed the first five stages six times now, but there were many failures before that, and we needed to develop the cheat of letting an AI control a character to do it.  If we were doing it in VR like I assume everyone else does, it would take even longer.”

“So, others have tried this and gotten to the final stage?  What do you know about it?”

“Crystals,” Conor replied.  “There is a puzzle involving crystals.  You are the second person we’ve tried to use to pass this, and all he can remember from the trial is that there were a bunch of crystals of different colors, and he had to arrange them in a pattern.  He failed twice and told us he didn’t want to try again.  The first time he failed, he didn’t remember anything.  He thought something had gone wrong and that he hadn’t even logged in or walked into the final cavern.  But he was in there for about 30 minutes and remembered none of it.

“The second time, he was in there for about three hours, said he failed, and that the punishment was to work through this simple mirror puzzle that made him extremely dizzy.  He feared going in a third time and didn’t think he would be able to solve the problem anyway since he was so disoriented that he couldn’t even describe it properly.”

“So, it’s not a sudoku.”

Conor laughed.  “I doubt it, but if you couldn’t solve that, we weren’t going to waste our time on you.”  He turned to look at Gracie and then at the screen.  “How close are we?”

Jason also looked at the TV and saw the paladin killing a frost giant with bodies of dead enemies lying everywhere in the snow.

“Almost there, maybe another fifteen minutes,” Gracie reported.  “Our guest should probably use the bathroom first.”

“I don’t think I have to go,” Jason said.  “Plus, you said after 36 minutes, if I don’t solve it, I fail and get booted back out.”

“Remember what I said about playing it safe,” Conor said.  “We go by the rules, and you should assume it will be at least 16 hours every time you enter the game.”

“Then I should eat too,” Jason advised.

Conor shook his head.  “We have IVs to feed you fluids and nutrients if necessary.  Some people have played for 48 hours straight before.  As I said, it is addictive.  But definitely use the bathroom.”

Jason shrugged indifferently and got up.  As he shifted his position, he felt his stomach churn and almost ran to the bathroom.  He was gone for an embarrassing length of time, and when he returned, he did not look happy.  “That pill you gave me.  The one you said was a muscle relaxant.  It wasn’t, was it.”

Conor tried not to laugh in the face of the angry man.  “If I had told you what it was, would you have taken it?”

Jason shook his head.

“Right, and then we would be in this situation where we are ready for you to go in, and you would still need to take the pill, and we would have to wait 20 minutes for it to work.  I’m sorry I lied to you, but I’ve done this before, and some lies are necessary.”

Jason didn’t want to ask about what else the man was lying about.  His anticipation for this experience was growing exponentially, and he felt that if he really understood what he was getting into, he might not do it.  He looked at the screen and saw the paladin facing off against two enormous winter wolves with a huge orc standing behind them, casting spells.  It looked like a shaman.

“This is the final boss of this level,” Gracie said.  “As soon as the second wolf is down to half health, the orc will cast his last hex and join the fight.  It should be only a few more minutes after that.”

“Good,” Conor said. “Let’s get you ready.”

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